Art in Review

By Holland Cotter

Published: March 12, 1993

James Hyde John Good Gallery 532 Broadway (at Spring Street) SoHo Through tomorrow

If James Hyde's one-person show of painting looks more like a group show of sculpture, that seems to be the point. The artist has stated that he wants to examine the individual elements that have made modern paintings paintings, and he does so by literally objectifying some of those components in three-dimensional form.

The dozens of small monochromatic gouaches in shades of green and violet nailed individually to a wooden board serve as equivalents of individual brush strokes. A large rectangular chunk of white Styrofoam fixed to the wall, its outward-facing surface covered with a layer of mustard-colored fresco, is a cartoon version of a built-up painterly surface. And a wall hanging of purple polyester knit fabric sewn to a blue tarpaulin that runs out across the gallery floor suggests a Color Field abstraction that has got a little out of hand.

Distancing their work from the art of their forebears was a goal of many painters in the 1980's. The intent was usually critical, either to point up modernism's darker side (Peter Halley turning the Utopian forms of geometric abstraction into prison floor plans), or its failure to generate the meaning it promised (Philip Taaffe presenting Barnett Newman's icons of the sublime as decorative designs).

By contrast, Mr. Hyde's view of painting as a cluster of highly eccentric, arbitrary and isolated formal devices that never settle down together doesn't rebuke and only gently debunks. One suspects that if the artist could just shift his present momentum into overdrive, the results might really become audacious. As it is, the work is intelligent and amusing and suggests that making modernism look klutzy rather than threatening may be another way of cutting a still-formidable legend down to size.